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Take back the responsibility

Dean Dudley

"Unfortunately, the palliative approach to health care is now the preferred model of education and it is not by teacher choice." Photo: Stuart Walmsley

When you are ill, you visit your family doctor to receive treatment. Imagine if the doctor welcomed you into their surgery, then turned on the television and made you watch an amusing show about the nature of your ''suspected'' condition.

You might actually feel a bit better because the show had taken your mind off the pain. Your doctor then could follow up with some amusing anecdotes about other people with your ''suspected'' condition that make you feel pretty good.

By this time, your 15-minute consultation is over and you are asked to leave the surgery, never able to seek treatment for that condition again. Mind you, the doctor could have diagnosed your condition and cured you but in a twisted interpretation of research evidence, they had been told this alternative program was the method they must use.

How would you feel, leaving without a proven treatment to cure your ailment? Pretty let down at the least, I would imagine. Don't get me wrong though; the evidence of positive psychology and emotion is very useful in the treatment of disease and injury, especially in palliative care. But it is also only a consideration when the treatment is going to be intolerable or during a palliative phase of health care.

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Unfortunately, the palliative approach to health care is now the preferred model of education and it is not by teacher choice. Education system administrators, senior educators and many in the research community are advocating and forcefully implementing this palliative approach in our school systems as the primary consideration in learning.

This current fascination by administrators with ''engagement'' being some type of bellwether of student achievement is a potentially dangerous dogma. It disguises a fact that many administrators and some researchers have no commonsense about what constitutes student achievement and progress but are in fact concerned with the ''window dressing'' of learning.

In fact, what we need in education is a massive shift to the primary healthcare model - one whereby teachers and researchers work together to develop effective diagnostic tools of progress in which learning can be reported and treatment provided as needed.

How do we return teacher autonomy and shift thinking to learning diagnosis? As a first step, we need empowered teachers who can affirm their role in the education bureaucracy.

Physicians have this power to some extent because since the time of Hippocrates they have pledged to society that they will hold the interests and needs of their patents sacred above all else.

Teachers, on the other hand, have their judgment and practices constantly vindicated by every researcher, politician and bureaucrat trying to push their own education agenda, which quite often does not have the learning interests of our children as the priority. In order to create empowered and effective teachers, I believe teachers need to re-examine the philosophical reason for their existence in the first place.

Imagine that teachers swore a type of Hippocratic Oath as they graduated as teachers. Would it empower teachers to resist artificial technocratic and political influence?

It might look something like this and give teachers the power to reclaim the learning of their students:

"I swear in the presence of all teachers that according to my ability and judgment I will keep this oath.

''I will follow that method of teaching, which according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my student and abstain from whatever is potentially harmful or mischievous …

''I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent danger, I will neither teach any student nor carry out any research on any child without the valid informed consent of the child and their parents or the appropriate legal protector thereof, understanding that research must have as its purpose the furtherance of the learning of that individual …

''While I continue to keep this oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art and science of teaching.''

Dean Dudley is a lecturer in the faculty of education at Charles Sturt University.

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